It has taken three and a half years into Barack Obama’s presidency for most Americans to realize that he has been deliberately destroying America by driving up the nation’s debt and deficit, reducing privately held wealth, forcing millions onto the public dole, undermining its moral structure, and weakening the nation’s reputation internationally..

His latest lie is that “the private sector is doing just fine”, but the numbers tell the whole story and one can find them on an excellent blog, Economic Collapse, that offers seventy examples:

— The official U.S. unemployment rate has been above eight percent (8%) for 40 months in a row. Unofficially, it is estimated to be closer to fifteen percent (15%).

— In 2007, about ten percent (10%) of all unemployed Americans had been out of work for 52 weeks or longer. Today that number is above thirty percent (30%).

— An astounding forty-nine percent (49%) of all Americans live in a home where at least one member is receiving government benefits.

— The middle class is shrinking. Ninety-five percent (95%) of the jobs lost during the current recession were middle class jobs.

— Instead of cutting spending to reduce debt, the Federal Reserve is “monetizing” much of the U.S. debt. It purchased “approximately sixty-one percent (61%) of all government debt issued by the U.S. Treasury in 2011.

— Perhaps the most frightening statistic cited was a survey that found that sixty-three percent (63%) of Americans “believe that the U.S. economic model is broken.”

It is not broken. The economic model that propelled America into a superpower would continue to provide prosperity if the nation’s “entitlement” programs were reformed, if the obscene government spending and production of regulations were reduced, if government housing finance entitles such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were eliminated, if the federal government’s purchase of the nation’s land mass was ended, if environmental laws without any basis in science were struck from the books, and if government control over the exploration and extracting of its vast energy reserves was greatly reduced.

It’s a tall order and it would require cleaning out a Congress that has imposed unsustainable burdens, including the highest corporate income tax in the world, and a level of taxation that requires those still holding jobs to annually work 107 days to earn enough money to pay local, state, and federal taxes.

If you check out the Progressive Caucus website, you will find nearly seventy members of the House are members and there is one from the Senate, the Socialist Bernie Sanders. In the 1950s they would have correctly been identified as Communists.

When Liberals and liberalism became unpopular, they began using the term Progressives. They are the descendents of every Democrat that voted for the New Deal, the War on Poverty, the creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the creation of the Departments of Energy, Education, and the Environmental Protection Agency. These are the people who in the early years of the last century imposed the income tax and engineered the creation of the Federal Reserve, a banking cartel that controls the economy.

At this point most conservatives have heard of Saul Alinksy’s 1972 book, “Rules for Radicals”, a guide to bringing about the destruction of the nation’s capitalist economic system and replace it with the kind of government that Barack Obama has tried to impose with the help of the many Communists and liberals in Congress.

The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” advocated a “massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls” in order to sabotage it and bring about “a political and financial crisis.” As it turned out, it was the collapse of the housing market that brought about the financial crisis they wanted, but following the Bush administration emergency bail-out of the banking system, the Obama administration with its Democrat-controlled Congress set about imposing historic debt through its $821 billion “stimulus.” Present debt exceeds the entire annual Gross Domestic Product.

It followed that with an unnecessary and wasteful bail-out of General Motors and Chrysler (instead of permitting a normal bankruptcy that would diminish the power of the unions that brought it about), and massive “investments” in failed solar and other alternative energy companies. The EPA was set free to try to impose regulations that would shut down a major portion of the nation’s producers of electricity.

Even though voters returned majority power to Republicans in the House of Representatives in 2010 the trail of destruction has continued and the bills they have passed to end our present financial troubles have been locked up in a Democrat-controlled Senate that has not passed a budget in the last three years.

We are now five months from an election to remove Obama from power and electing conservative lawmakers to office. It’s a start in restoring America to its former prosperity.

This may be the golden age of presumptuous ignorance. The most recent demonstrations of that are the Occupy Wall Street mobs. It is doubtful how many of these semi-literate sloganizers could tell the difference between a stock and a bond.

Yet there they are, mouthing off about Wall Street on television, cheered on by politicians and the media. If this is not a golden age of presumptuous ignorance, perhaps it should be called a brass age.

No one has more brass than the President of the United States, though his brass may be more polished than that of the Occupy Wall Street mobs. When Barack Obama speaks loftily about “investing in the industries of the future,” does anyone ask: What in the world would qualify him to know what are the industries of the future?

Why would people who have spent their careers in politics know more about investing than people who have spent their careers as investors?

Presumptuous ignorance is not confined to politicians or rowdy political activists, by any means. From time to time, I get a huffy letter or e-mail from a reader who begins, “You obviously don’t know what you are talking about…”

The particular subject may be one on which my research assistants and I have amassed piles of research material and official statistics. It may even be a subject on which I have written a few books, but somehow the presumptuously ignorant just know that I didn’t really study that issue, because my conclusions don’t agree with theirs or with what they have heard.

At one time I was foolish enough to try to reason with such people. But one of the best New Year’s resolutions I ever made, some years ago, was to stop trying to reason with unreasonable people. It has been good for my blood pressure and probably for my health in general.

A recent column that mentioned the “indirect subsidies” from the government to the Postal Service brought the presumptuously ignorant out in force, fighting mad.

Because the government does not directly subsidize the current operating expenses of the Postal Service, that is supposed to show that the Postal Service pays its own way and costs the taxpayers nothing.

Politicians may be crooks but they are not fools. Easily observed direct subsidies can create a political problem. Far better to set up an arrangement that will allow government-sponsored enterprises — whether the Postal Service, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or the Tennessee Valley Authority — to operate in such a way that they can claim to be self-supporting and not costing the taxpayers anything, no matter how much indirect subsidy they get.

As just one example, the Postal Service has a multi-billion dollar line of credit at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Hey, we could all use a few billions, every now and then, to get us over the rough spots. But we are not the Postal Service.

Theoretically, the Postal Service is going to pay it all back some day, and that theoretical possibility keeps it from being called a direct subsidy. The Postal Service is also exempt from paying taxes, among other exemptions it has from costs that other businesses have to pay.

Exemption from taxes, and from other requirements that apply to other businesses, are also not called subsidies. For people who mistake words for realities, that is enough for them to buy the political line — and to get huffy with those who don’t.

Loan guarantees are a favorite form of hidden subsidies for all sorts of special interests. At a given point in time, it can be said that these guarantees cost the taxpayers nothing. But when they suddenly do cost something — as with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — they can cost billions.

One of the reasons for so much presumptuous ignorance flourishing in our time may be the emphasis on “self-esteem” in our schools and colleges. Children not yet a decade old have been encouraged, or even required, to write letters to public figures, sounding off on issues ranging from taxes to nuclear missiles.

Our schools begin promoting presumptuous ignorance early on. It is apparently one of the few things they teach well. The end result is people without much knowledge, but with a lot of brass.

Many people make resolutions to start the year, but I think a list of things that must be done to protect and preserve the Republic should be tallied.

1. President Obama must be defeated in 2012 and the obstructionist Democratic Party must lose power in the Senate to ensure both houses of Congress will be Republican and in a position to initiate real change.

2. The Environmental Protection Agency must be reined in with increased Congressional oversight and legislative limits on its rule-making capacity. Having fulfilled its 1970 mandate to clean the nation’s air and water, it should be scaled back to the maintenance of these functions.

3. Americans, despite the administration’s efforts to redefine and distract us, must keep clearly in mind the threat of Islam to the nation and the world. A Middle East in turmoil lays ahead for 2012.

4. To jump-start the economy, taxes and spending must be reduced across the board. A tax on consumption, rather than income would be a good start. Only 49% of Americans currently pay income taxes, the lowest in decades.

5. Obamacare must be repealed should the Supreme Court fail to rule that the Commerce Clause takes precedence over its requirement that Americans must purchase health insurance or be fined for not doing so.

6. A serious restructuring of Social Security and Medicare must be undertaken. Older Americans who have paid into the system—it is involuntary—must be ensured their benefits will be paid, but younger citizens should have the freedom and responsibility to structure their own retirement and health plans.

7. Access to the nation’s vast reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil should be increased and encouraged. Oil companies should be encouraged to build more refineries via tax credits and removal of “environmental” obstacles.

8. Congress needs to identify and fund the repair to the nation’s aging infrastructure.

9. Utilities should be encouraged via tax credits and other incentives to expand the national “grid” for the distribution of electricity.

10. Term limits for Senators and Representatives should be added to the U.S. Constitution in the same fashion the presidency is limited. Salaries, pensions, and perks should be capped. A permanent political class is a danger to citizens.

11. The Federal government should be downsized with the elimination of the Departments of Education, Labor, and Energy, along with the Environmental Protection Agency. These powers should be returned to the individual States. (10th Amendment)

12. The nation’s military which has been significantly reduced in size and structure should be expanded with attention to the upgrade and increase of its naval fleet and aircraft.

13. Congress should reject and rescind all legislation based on “global warming” or “climate change” as the former has been demonstrated to be a hoax and the latter is meaningless insofar as the climate is beyond the control of humans.

14. The United States should significantly reduce its contribution to the United Nations and refuse to ratify any of its treaties.

15. Tort reform should be instituted to reduce the costs of health care.

16. The corporate tax rate should be significantly reduced from its present rate, one of the highest in the world, to increase expansion, new jobs, and competitiveness.

17. Public service unions should be illegal. The federal government does not permit such unionization and neither should states.

18. National Public Radio should no longer be funded. The “government entities” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be eliminated.

19. The federal government should be restricted or significantly limited from the acquisition of more of the nation’s landmass.

20. Strenuous efforts must be undertaken to reduce the national debt and deficit. A devalued dollar impoverishes everyone.

These are just a few changes which, if implemented, would go a long way to reducing the ills associated with a federal government grown too large, subject to crony capitalism, and corruption.

As John Adams said, “Let us disappoint the men who are raising themselves upon the ruin of this Country.”

Take a stroll through your neighborhood Occupy Wall Street protest–whether it’s in New York or Chicago, Detroit or San Francisco–and you’re likely to see a recurring theme emblazoned across cardboard signs: redistribute wealth from the 1 percent to the 99 percent, all in the name of fairness, whether or not it makes good policy. Or if you want to hear that message without fighting the crowds, you could save yourself some time, turn on the TV, and tune in to President Barack Obama’s latest campaign swing across America, this time titled “We Can’t Wait.”

“I’m here to say that we can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job. Where they won’t act, I will,” President Obama proclaimed in Las Vegas, Nevada. “There is no excuse for the games and gridlock we’ve seen in Washington. Where we don’t have to wait for Congress, we’re just going to go ahead and act on our own.” The actions the President is proposing? More money for “underwater” mortgages and a yet-to-be-announced student loan initiative.

There is no hiding the ball in the President’s populist pitch–and that ball is Obama’s desire to circumvent Congress and enact policies that appeal to his far-left, big-government base, regardless of the will of the people or their representatives in the House and Senate. Obama’s problem is that he failed to convince the American people–and his own party–to pass his latest stimulus plan (a.k.a., “the American Jobs Act”), and now he’s headed into an election season with 14 million jobless Americans, a 9.1 percent unemployment rate, stagnant economic growth as far as the eye can see, and nothing to show for it.

Entirely frustrated by his inability to ram his big spending plan through an unwilling Congress, the President now says that “we can’t wait” for Congress to act. What he’s missing, though, is that Congress isn’t acting because the American people don’t want their representatives in Washington to go along with Obama’s spend-more-tax-more scheme. It seems that the only audience that might be receptive to the President’s message is the protesters who are camping out in solid opposition to the capitalist system, advocating for the government to bail them out, just like it bailed out the banks and the automakers. It now looks like the President is about to oblige and that the “we” he’s referring to is the protesters and him.

Yesterday in San Francisco, the city’s Board of Supervisors held a hearing in which Occupy San Francisco activists urged the board to adopt policies that would prompt big banks to modify mortgages for struggling homeowners, as Bloomberg reports. The President’s latest proposal doesn’t look much different. It would refinance mortgages of homeowners who owe more on than their houses than they are currently worth. Heritage’s David John explains that the cost of the refinanced loans will be borne by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which means that American taxpayers will be on the hook for the cost. What’s worse, this plan likely won’t be any more successful than the Administration’s previous attempts to shore up the mortgage industry.

It seems that the President is about to address another concern of the “Occupy” protesters–student loans. Many of the activists are complaining about their student loans and the cost of college education and are demanding that the government pay their debts and/or provide free tuition. Though we don’t yet know what the President will propose, we do know that student loan forgiveness and federally subsidized loans are not the way to reduce the cost of education. Heritage’s Lindsey Burke explains:

It is unfair to forgive student loans on the backs of waitresses and construction workers, and the nearly three-quarters of Americans who didn’t graduate college. Increases in federal subsidies or student loan bailouts shift the burden of paying for college from the student – the person directly benefiting from college – to the millions of Americans who did not graduate from college.

Burke also points out that federal subsidies have not reduced college costs. While those subsidies have increased 475 percent, the cost of attending college has increased 439 percent since 1982. As students have more purchasing power, Burke writes, colleges are incentivized to raise tuition. “It’s a vicious cycle that does nothing to mitigate the cost of attending college,” Burke says.

But does bad policy matter to the President? Is his end game to improve America’s economic situation or to appeal to his base? Is he taking cues from Occupy Wall Street protesters as he acts unilaterally to enact tried-and-failed policies? One thing is certain: Regardless of the answer, America cannot wait for President Obama to stop circumventing Congress.

Journalism is often called “History written in a hurry.” If so, last week’s headlines from the front page of The Wall Street Journal reflected a period of our current history that will likely have future historians wondering how we made it through these times without completely losing our minds.

If fear sells newspapers, drives television news ratings, gets bad laws passed, and is useful for selling all manner of other goods and services, than last week must have been very good for business.

The weekend edition, Saturday/Sunday, September 3-4, began with “Job Growth Grinds to a Halt.” The sub-headline was “Lack of Hiring in August Roils Financial Markets; Gloom Ratchets Up Pressure on Obama.” The President would have to wait until the following Thursday to roll out his “Jobs” bill and to tell a joint session of Congress, “Pass this bill now!”

Reluctant to admit its role in the housing mortgage crisis that broke in late 2008 during the political campaign and largely due to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—both of whom own 50% of U.S. mortgages—the next article on page one was “U.S. Sues Big Banks Over Home Mortgages.”

Monday was Labor Day so there was no WSJ edition, but on Tuesday, September 6, the lead headline was “Europe Signals Global Gloom” with a sub-headline, “World Markets Fall as Continent’s Debt Crisis Fuels Worries of Lengthy Slowdown.” It reminded me of the cliché that, when the U.S. sneezes, the rest of the world gets pneumonia.” Under the lead story was a headline, “Voter Discontent Deepens Ahead of Obama Jobs Plan.”

By Wednesday, September 7, the headline was “Euro Woes Stir Currency Fears” with a sub-headline, “Older Americans Held Hostage by Mortgages.”

On Thursday, September 8, the headline was “Fed Prepares to Act” with a sub-headline, “Officials Consider Unusual Steps to Avert an Economic Stall.” The nation has been stalled since 2008 when gobs of taxpayer money was used to bailout banks, an insurance company, and two major auto manufacturers. Meanwhile, an accompanying headline said, “U.S. Hits Builders with Pay Probe” about a Labor Department investigation “of the top companies in home building, hitting them with a broad demand for records that has led to complaints of regulatory overreach.” You think?

By Friday, following Obama’s speech, the lead headline was “Obama’s Bid to Spur Growth.” The sub-headline was “President Asks Congress for $447 Billion in Cuts, Spending; Tepid GOP Response.” With a $14 trillion national debt, I’d be tepid, too.

The proposed bill would be paid for with tax increases that would kick in after the next election in 2012. They are the same increases a Democrat-controlled Congress refused to authorize!

The Saturday weekend edition, led off with “Banker’s Exit Rattles Markets” and a sub-headline, “In Europe, Top ECB Economist Resigns, Seen as Policy Protest; Dow Industrials Fall 303.68 points.”

Obama speaks. The Dow tanks. Coincidence? I think not.

The other lead article headline was “Treasury Weighs New Tax Scheme.” It began “Treasury floats the notion of eliminating some, but not all taxes on overseas profits of U.S. multinational companies…”

Thus, the week’s WSJ headlines were a microcosm of the fears defining the economies of the U.S. and European nations whose socialist programs and massive over-spending had landed all of them in hot water.

We expect and we want government to exercise prudence in the management of public funds, but successive administrations and congresses did not, electing always to expand government. Let’s hope the Fed does not want to print more money. It will cause a collapse of confidence.

Today’s glut of unwanted homes on the market, with unending foreclosures in some parts of the country, is a serious drag holding back any chance of economic recovery. Instead of eating our peas – as President Obama lectured Americans to do – and letting the market find its equilibrium, the administration is looking for an easy, temporary way out of the problem through modified mortgages for underwater homeowners. It won’t work.

The Obama administration wants to let millions of homeowners with government-backed mortgages refinance their loans at current low rates, which are about 4 percent. A very large percentage of those loans are underwater, and the homeowners couldn’t get lower rates without government intervention. The White House is acting as if forced refinancing is a free lunch. It’s not. Reducing the interest rate that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac get paid on these loans will cost the government-sponsored enterprises tens of billions of dollars a year.

The reality is that Fannie and Freddie are effectively part of the government, and they hold $730 billion and $680 billion worth of mortgage securities respectively. The Federal Reserve System has $900 billion worth of securities insured by Fannie and Freddie. The Treasury held about $80 billion of those securities in July. What all this means is that taxpayers are investors in mortgage-backed securities whether they want to be or not. Don’t believe the Obama administration’s populist rhetoric that it wants to reduce the costs of borrowing for homeowners at the expense of big investors in mortgage-backed securities. In this case, what Democrats really are trying to do is redistribute wealth from all taxpayers to underwater homeowners, not from fat cats to the starving homeless.

This is a Hail Mary pass that won’t work. There is little evidence that lowering payments reduces the risk of default and foreclosure. If that were indeed the case, private lenders would have an incentive to modify mortgages, which they aren’t doing on a massive scale. It’s also not clear why irresponsible people who bought larger houses than they could afford should be rewarded with cheaper mortgages than the market is willing to provide. Once again, the thrifty will be asked to bail out the profligate. The moral hazard and perverse incentives created by such a system are symbolic of an Obama economy that inhibits smart investment and growth.

The bottom line is, unemployment has a far greater impact on default risk than monkeying with mortgages. If millions of jobless Americans had work, they wouldn’t be defaulting on their loans. To create jobs, government needs to cut spending and red tape so the private sector has the confidence to invest in new hires. Washington bureaucrats won’t outsmart the market. Instead, they need to let the housing market find its bottom, which is when recovery can begin. Anything else simply prolongs the pain – and this Great Recession.

The United States of America has had a AAA credit rating since 1917. That rating survived WWI, the Great Depression, World War II, The Korean War, Vietnam, Jimmy Carter, 9-11, and those “unfunded” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It however could not survive less than one term of the current President’s misguided “Social” Policies. The Smoking Gun of America’s Financial Meltdown [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPSDnGMzIdo&feature=player_ … Read More

Dodd-Frank, the 2,300-page financial “reform” monstrosity spearheaded by Capitol Hill corruptocrats, turned 1 this week. It made too-big banks bigger. It made too-risky incentives riskier. It made a lousy economy lousier. Billed as a “consumer protection” act, Dodd-Frank has succeeded phenomenally — in protecting and stimulating the business-stifling business of government.

Dodd-Frank is a tyrannical triumph of rule-makers, lobbyists and other non-elected spongers over taxpayers. If you don’t want an unseemly glimpse into the self-serving, sausage-making process that feeds the insatiable Beltway industry, read no further. The law’s implementation process is so far-reaching and Byzantine that every member of Congress should be suffering migraines from it.

Quite expectedly, the feds have met a scant 12 percent of rule-making requirements dictated by the grandstanding Dodd-Frank law as of July 1. According to legal and regulatory watchdogs Davis Polk and Wardwell, regulators missed 131 deadlines over the past year. Moreover, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Commodities and Futures Trading Commission have been granting “temporary relief” deferrals (de facto waivers a la Obamacare) left and right to targets in the swaps industry.

Here is just a brief sample of “upcoming activity” on Dodd-Frank (with many rule-making deadlines still to be determined) published on the Securities and Exchange Commission website:

Section 919: Issue rules, as the Commission deems appropriate, designating documents or information that must be provided by a broker or dealer to a retail investor before the purchase of an investment product or service

Section 921: Issue rules, as the Commission deems appropriate, addressing agreements that require customers or clients of any broker, dealer or investment adviser to arbitrate disputes arising under the Federal securities laws

Section 967: Report to Congress describing actions to implement the regulatory and administrative recommendations contained in the independent consultant’s report on the SEC’s organization.

Now multiply that language by more than 400 rules total and tens of thousands of pages, scores of lobbying firms and legions of lawyers.

While disastrous bailout behemoths Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac get off scot-free, small businesses, small community banks and small broker-dealers have been hit hard by the vagueness, uncertainty and cost burdens created by the Dodd-Frank-enstein monster. Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office estimates that the feds will need $1.25 billion for 11 different agencies to fund the rule-making racket by 2012 — including $481 million for the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Co-father Barney Frank bragged that his freakishly ineffective creation is “holding up well” in public opinion on its first birthday. But that’s because public opinion is shaped by vague, Wall Street-bashing sound bites instead of hard-nosed assessments of the law’s impotence-by-design.

In its analysis of the few rules that have been finalized, law firm Morrison and Foerster LLP — quoted in the financial adviser publication Investment News — concluded that Dodd-Frank regulations “do not address or resolve the core systemic risk issues in the act.” Moreover, “with elections coming up, and with international reform measures dragging along, one cannot help but wonder how, when or even if many of the act’s reforms will be put in place.”

As they say in the software industry, the government budget-lining bureaucratic delays are not bugs. They’re features of yet another Beltway Industry Full-Time Employment Act.

To President Obama and all 535 Voting members of the Legislature It is now Official that the Majority of you are Corrupt Morons The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775. You have had 234 years to get it right and it is broke. Social Security was established in 1935. You have had 74 years to get it right and it is broke. Fannie Mae was established in 1938. You have had 71 years to get it right and it is broke. War on Poverty started in 19 … Read More

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